E.B. White’s Here Is New York will never suffer from a lack of fans. So I don’t feel bad (especially since we sell at least 100 copies a year for the old fellow) posting a link to a contrarian view, published in Salon back in the pre-9/11 era. According to Charles Taylor, White was a big old phony, his descriptions of NYC a string of cliches:
Thus, White can
encounter the residents of the Lower East Side sitting on their stoops
on a hot summer night and banish the crowding and poverty by
transforming it into “the nightly garden party of the Lower East Side
… It is folksy [emphasis added] here with the smell of warm
flesh and squashed fruit and fly-bitten filth in the gutter, and
cooking.” Visit exotic New York! See the quaint and colorful peasants!
“A large, cheerful Negro” panhandler begging coins from a crowd exiting
a Broadway show prompts White to observe that “a few minutes of
minstrelsy improves the condition of one Negro by about eight dollars.
If he does as well as this at every performance, he has a living right
there.” (And eventually, no doubt, a summer place in the Hamptons.)
The rest here.
Thoughts?
p.s. Speaking of dead New Yorker writers, RIP John Updike (1932-2009).
Interesting, isn’t it, that the author of the Salon piece is a reluctant arrival to New York, an admitted Bostonite all too eager to heap scorn on anyone that would praise such a damnable city as this one.
Not to rush to White’s defense for it is interesting to think about the essay being one of reflection and not involvement.
Is there anything White wrote earlier, that contradicts what is in “Here is New York”? Did he ever hang with a decidedly different crowd or talk a decidedly different talk? This is me trying to recall mentions of Whitman notstalgizing the crowds at the Bowery…
I don’t know tons about White’s biography, but I’m sure there wouldn’t have been quite the contrast you’re talking about with Whitman: between his more conservative position as an editorialist in the 1840s and his later nostalgic positioning of himself among the working men (say, in his essay on the old Bowery Theater).
I think what you can really see in White is the difficulty of writing about New York without letting a) your personal nostalgia for bygone days getting the best of you, or b) the *idea* of New York outweigh realities.
Plus, to the degree he engages in soft-selling poverty in a sort of sentimentalization of folksy ethnicity, he participates in a long tradition — reaching back to the Village bohemians, Henry James, and perhaps even back to Whitman.
Bryan,
Thanks for the post.
I haven’t read ‘This Is New York’ for a few years and seem to remember parts of it at least ringing a good deal more true than Taylor wants to give him credit for. But I DO remember thinking there was a whole lot of hokum and sentimentality as well, that definitely didn’t ring true with my eighteen years on and off in the city.
I still prefer Joseph Mitchell, who I can read again and again.
Best,
Tim
Thanks, Tim, for the comment. I agree: Mitchell is hard to top! I esp love the Old Mr. Flood essays.